The Supreme Court vs. the United States, Part 1: Alito Loves Fetuses, Hates Women

You will never love anything as much as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito loves fetuses. That skeevy, creepy motherfucker is all about the fetuses; he loves fetuses so much that he doesn't give a fuck how many women must die in order for fetuses to live and become babies that he can then ignore and strip away their rights. Seriously, that savage cockscab must jack it to ultrasounds. You think I'm being hyperbolic? You think I'm just trying to be extra cruel to this ratcunt because he authored the majority decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that specifically overturned Roe v. Wade and the guarantee of the right to an abortion in the entire country? You think it's because I fucking hate him and Thomas and Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Barrett for ensuring that women in some of our biggest cities, like Houston, Dallas, Nashville, and New Orleans, with Indianapolis and Atlanta no doubt not far behind, can't get an abortion and women from small communities can't travel to those cities and that all the women in these savage states will have to travel hundreds, if not a thousand miles (no, really) to reach a state where abortion is legal and that if they can't, many of them will resort to methods that will harm if not kill them? 

Yeah, all that. But also because Alito can't fucking get enough of fetuses. Check out the decision. Seriously, this part will make your head fucking explode: "The dissent has much to say about the effects of pregnancy on women, the burdens of motherhood, and the difficulties faced by poor women. These are important concerns. However, the dissent evinces no similar regard for a State’s interest in protecting prenatal life." You got that? Hey, little ladies, your burdens, all your health effects, all your difficulties are important, says big white male Alito, but, really, a clump of cells that can't survive on its own is just as important as you. 

By the way, 93% of all abortions are in the first trimester. Yeah, it's a fucking clump of cells for most of that and still completely nonviable towards the end of 12 weeks.

That clump of cells is given far more rights than women by Alito as he considers the notion of "viability," as defined by the Roe and Casey decisions: "According to the dissent, the Constitution requires the States to regard a fetus as lacking even the most basic human right—to live—at least until an arbitrary point in a pregnancy has passed...If, as Roe held, a State’s interest in protecting prenatal life is compelling 'after viability,' why isn’t that interest 'equally compelling before viability'?" In other words, if a state thinks you should stay pregnant, bitch, you're staying pregnant. That fetus controls you. You only exist to protect the rights of the fetus. Your rights don't matter if you have a fetus.

Alito goes on, dickishly, "Due to the development of new equipment and improved practices, the viability line has changed over the years. In the 19th century, a fetus may not have been viable until the 32d or 33d week of pregnancy or even later. When Roe was decided, viability was gauged at roughly 28 weeks. Today, respondents draw the line at 23 or 24 weeks. So, according to Roe’s logic, States now have a compelling interest in protecting a fetus with a gestational age of, say, 26 weeks, but in 1973 States did not have an interest in protecting an identical fetus. How can that be?" Yes, it's so weird how things change with medical advances. C'mon, this is just making shit up to justify an obviously bullshit opinion. Or, you know, the conservative way.

You think that's mindbogglingly fucked up? Wait: "Viability also depends on the 'quality of the available medical facilities.' Thus, a 24-week-old fetus may be viable if a woman gives birth in a city with hospitals that provide advanced care for very premature babies, but if the woman travels to a remote area far from any such hospital, the fetus may no longer be viable. On what ground could the constitutional status of a fetus depend on the pregnant woman’s location? And if viability is meant to mark a line having universal moral significance, can it be that a fetus that is viable in a big city in the United States has a privileged moral status not enjoyed by an identical fetus in a remote area of a poor country?" Fuck Alito in every fucking hole he has and in a few that don't exist yet.

Alito and the rest of a cruel quintet who overruled Roe and Casey are quite literally splitting the country in two so that the quality of health care a woman receives will be dependent on which state she lives in. But that doesn't matter. What does matter is that a fetus might live outside the womb if born prematurely a couple of weeks earlier in a city than in a village in the mountains of Ecuador? About 1% of all abortions happen after 21 weeks. How does that in any way justify a decision that will allow states to outlaw the 99% of abortions that clearly occur before the fetus can live on its own? Even John Roberts thought that was fucked. It's a fucking game to the majority. It's absolutely nonsensical, so much that it only makes sense if you say that Alito loves fetuses and hates women, which is part and parcel with a Christian extremist view of the sexes.

Because that's what this is, you know. It is a cabal of Christian extremists, radical Catholics and nutzoid fundamentalists, deciding that women have had enough freedom and those whores deserve whatever hell they have to go through. They are imposing their radical, extremist doctrine on the rest of us and pretending that it's freedom.

In my home state of Louisiana, the anti-choice Democratic governor signed an update to the state's trigger law on Monday that said abortion would be outlawed in the state the second Roe was overturned. And so it was. The three remaining clinics in the state, in Shreveport, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans, stopped performing abortions. While the morning after pill remains legal, other drug-induced abortions are also outlawed, and there are no exceptions for pregnancies for rape and incest. With Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi also banning abortions, the closest place for a safe, legal abortion right now is in Pensacola, Florida, and who knows how long that will last with Ron DeSantis fascisting up the joint. Then women in Louisiana would have to travel to North Carolina or Illinois. Madness. And then states might pass laws that say you can't travel through them to get an abortion because of course they will.

Sorry. I'm not thinking completely rationally today. We've known this day was coming for a long time. We've been waiting for it since at least the 1990s, probably since Clarence Thomas was confirmed. Many of us have been waving our arms and screaming that this was coming, to stop trusting any motherfuckers who said not to worry, to stop pretending that anyone on the right was honorable. We knew it would happen. 

But that expectation doesn't make it hurt less. It doesn't reduce the feeling of panic. It doesn't mitigate the despair for what a fucked beyond fucked nation we've become, what backwater we've turned into. We're not a shining city on a hill. We're a teetering shack on a pile of shit.

Mostly, though, it doesn't make me feel less sorrowful for women, from the preteen rape victim to the mother who doesn't want another child to any woman or girl who fucking wants to choose when she has children. If my nieces get pregnant, I will fly them anywhere they want to go if they want to get rid of the fetus. Fuck that fetus.

We failed. We fucked up and we failed. We let the worst fucking people keep winning. We can't let that keep happening. There's going to be a pile of women's corpses to remind us of that. 

The vile Christian pricks have tasted blood. They are completely unleashed, and they are heading for a feeding frenzy. We better be ready. It's about to get genuinely frightening out there. 

More on that coming up.

Call It What It Was: An Assassination Attempt on Mike Pence

I have despised Mike Pence longer than most of you, even before he was that fuckin' conservative prick in Congress from 2001-2012, even before he was that motherfucking governor who refused to allow a needle exchange program in a town with a high rate of HIV (until he prayed and partially gave in). Yeah, see, I was damned to live in Indiana in the late-1990s when Pence was a right-wing radio twatmite, advocating for laws against adultery and railing against the cartoon Mulan for daring to say that women could be in the military with men and hating on LGBT people with a fervor that could only be described as protesting way, way too much. When I say, "Fuck him in every hole from ass to eye," I mean it. 

So if I say anything that is perceived as a kind word about him, just know that I really think he's lower than worm shit. 

That said, yeah, Pence did one good thing with his sad, homophobic, nutzoid Christian life. He stood firm against a wave of spittle and being called a "pussy" and "wimp" from Donald Trump, as well as Trump's caricature of a mob boss threat that "I don't want to be your friend anymore if you don't do this," and ratified the electoral count in the 2020 presidential election. I don't think he did that for honorable reasons. He consulted with, among others, former Vice President Dan Quayle, who told him, "I also know what the law is. You listen to the parliamentarian. That’s all you do. You have no power" when Pence sought his blessing in overturning a clean election, which would have thrown the country into dictatorship. Pence had spent the last five years being Trump's most loyal lickspittle, a remora suctioned onto Trump's ass so tightly that he may as well have been Trump's vestigial tail. Pence wasn't strong. Pence certainly wasn't a goddamn hero. He was scared that he'd break the law and end up in prison if it all went sideways. He didn't want to commit a crime. He didn't do the right thing so much as he didn't do the wrong thing. So, fuck it, may as well act like the great defender of the Constitution.

And what did Pence get for his trouble? As his chief of staff Marc Short told the January 6 committee, he was so worried "that the president would lash out in some way" over Pence's disloyalty that Short contacted the head of Pence's Secret Service detail to make sure they were ready in case shit went south. And south it went.

Let's stop beating around the goddamn bush with this shit. The January 6 attack on the Capitol was, among other things, a coordinated assassination attempt on Mike Pence, one that was cheered on, if not directed, by the President of the United States, who really was Donald Trump. 

In front of a mob that was there specifically to stage a coup (which is what it's called when a group tries to use force to throw out the results of a legal election and install their own people, whether that's as electors or president), Trump kept expressing how Pence "is going to have to come through for us. And if he doesn't, that will be a sad day for our country." Trump didn't stop there, coming right up to the line of threat: "And Mike Pence, I hope you're going to stand up for the good of our Constitution and for the good of our country. And if you're not, I'm going to be very disappointed in you, I will tell you right now." 

Of course, Trump didn't have to threaten. He had a horde of cretins who were slobbering all over each other to do his bidding. I mean, did no one remember what happened at Trump's Nazi rallies when he verbally attacked protesters and cheered on and encouraged physical violence against them? People fucking did it. They got violent on his order. Trump fucking well knew the powder keg was right in front of him, and that narcissistic cockscab wanted to see what would happen if he lit the fuse.  And when Trump had a chance to calm shit down, he threw fuel on the fuse by tweeting that "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done." That's insanity.

So what did Pence get to hear from the hooting cretins who were heading towards and into the Capitol? Chants of "Hang Mike Pence!" and "Bring out Pence!" His Secret Service team brought him to a secure location in the building, coming within 40 feet of Trump's zombie army that he could hear rampaging around, calling for murder of him and anyone who would betray their orange idol. And Pence refused to leave in a Secret Service vehicle, fearing, at the very least, that the president would order him driven away and kept away from the count. That is fucking insanity. That is fear of assassination by the mob, ordered or at least ordered-by-implication by Donald Trump.

You can say that Pence bravely stuck to ratifying the electoral vote count, but that fear of prison hung over him hard. And I think fear is why Pence will not testify before the January 6 Committee. Sure, I know he's delusional and craven enough to think that he might have a chance at a future in politics that will be shitcanned if he puts a stake in Trump's desiccated heart, not realizing his career is dead already, and I know that Liz Cheney and the committee are doing their damnedest to spin things as if there are decent Republicans, even if Pence helped the country get to the point where a goddamned coup was attempted by vigorously bobbing on Trump's knob for the entire term. 

But Trump's army is still out there. And they're armed. And they are violent and insane. And they want blood, specifically Pence's blood, for his betrayal. And you know that life has been one nonstop death threat for Pence and his family because that's how these motherfuckers roll. If we can call the non-attempt on Brett Kavanaugh's life an "assassination attempt," then this is an ongoing assassination plot to kill the former vice president.

So I'm gonna say the possibly kind words about Pence here: If this fear of being killed is figuring into Pence's silence and it's not just false hopes of a political future, I sympathize. That means he's capable of feeling trauma, as any normal person would, and it means he wants to protect his family. Again, he's despicable in every other way and, mostly, I don't give a shit if he lives or dies now, but I get it and it makes sense. 

But that also means he can't be a hero in this story. He's just the guy in the horror movie who walked away after the monster seemed to be defeated, not making sure that fucker can't rise again and kill even more people in the sequel.

(Note: I do hope the 1/6 Committee is going to look into the other assassination attempts on Nancy Pelosi and Democrats, and not just leave it at Pence.)

Liz Cheney Is Trying to Save the House She and Her Father Built and Other Observations on the 1/6 Hearing

On Thursday night, the Select Committee on the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol finally, after far too long, frankly, made its case to the American people and the world. The committee wasn't talking to you and me, we who are damned to spend far too much of our time elbow-deep in the clogged sinks of political shit. The committee wasn't talking to the scores of MAGA drones who are joyfully face-fucked by dildos of misinformation, disinformation, and lies and will never return to what we like to think of as "reality." They were clearly talking to other entities, including, as many have noted, Attorney General Merrick Garland, whose Justice Department is moving at a pace that might be best described as "nearly still" when it comes to charging top officials with crimes related to the attack. To my weary (and currently Covid-addled) mind, the hearings had another target: Americans who checked out after Donald Trump's second impeachment and haven't followed the evolving story. For them, much of what was said on Thursday was new, and let's just fucking hope that at least a few of them watched. 

As strong as committee chair Bennie Thompson's opening statement was, with its clear and almost immediate assertion that "Donald Trump lost the presidential election in 2020. The American people voted him out of office," as well as clearly placing Trump as the central figure in a conspiracy to overturn the election, it was Republican Rep. Liz Cheney who truly brought the wood chipper to shred the MAGA right and, most especially, Trump himself.

Cheney's purpose was also clear: to separate the good Republicans from the Trumpist Republicans, and to give those supposedly good ones a chance to come clean by warning them about what's coming. In essence, Cheney was trying to save the party that her father built, one that she worked on, too. The MAGA right has turned away from the beliefs and projects of Cheney and daddy Dick, the former Vice President, Secretary of Defense, and member of Congress. Among other things, that GOP was pro-business no matter what (none of this bullshit condemning a corporation for an internal policy) and pro-intelligence community. Cheney constructed a GOP that was for a strong interventionist military, especially with the goal of "spreading democracy" at the end of a gun, which was incredible for profits for companies aligned (mostly but not exclusively) with the GOP. Trump mocked that and turned the party more isolationist, and he attacked IC for its perceived disloyalty to him. You might not remember, but a decade ago, Liz Cheney and your new Twitter buddy William Kristol led an organization called "Keep America Safe," which was all about attacking Democrats for being soft on Muslims. They went after anyone who supported the "Ground Zero Mosque," and they attacked lawyers who defended detainees at the Guantanamo Naval Base, calling them the "Al Qaeda Seven," questioning their loyalty to the country. She's just the fucking worst. 

In her truly great presentation on the evidence against Trump and his despicable co-conspirators, like a compelling opening statement in a huge trial, one thread that ran under it was that you could be an honorable Republican or a dishonorable one, and she was pretty fuckin' clear about who she thought was on the side of honor. She showed a clip of Trump's Attorney General Bill Barr, who was also AG when Dick Cheney was George H. W. Bush's Secretary of Defense, declaring that the allegations of voter fraud were "nonsense" and "it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time on that, and it was doing a great grave disservice to the country," even backing up the opinion of Barr with video of Ivanka Trump saying, "I respect Attorney General Barr. So, I accepted what he was saying." Mike Pence is also praised by inference, playing a clip of him saying, "President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election," along with video of Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley saying that Pence was giving orders about securing the Capitol and not Trump. "Look at these loyal Republicans," Cheney was saying, "this is who this party is supposed to be."

It's worth noting that not a single clip of a Democrat reacting to the attack or condemning the attack was played. Just Republicans.

So let's be clear: Yes, obviously, her running at Donald Trump with a dagger to cut his throat and dance in the arterial spray is awesome. At this point, we'll take anyone who will actually help turn this ship around before it plunges off the edge of the world. I'm totally fucking here for Cheney burning down the house of Trump. But Cheney is doing it to preserve an already corrupt and harmful party. Jesus fuck, Trump wasn't president when Mitch McConnell blocked the consideration of Garland for the Supreme Court. Trump didn't force Cheney to vote against voting rights legislation. She has done exactly one thing to try to save the country before she goes back to destroying it under her terms.

It sucks, but we'll take it because while we may all be circumspect about what will come, what we know is that we were almost fucked in January 2021. One or two factors could have fucked it all, from Pence deciding to throw in with Trump to the violent shitbirds succeeding in murdering some legislators. We were so close to fucked that we need to ally with those who we would otherwise want to defeat. And we need to save ourselves from what is the inevitable next phase of this coup and from Donald fucking Trump, who comes across not as a buffoon in the evidence presented so far, but as an angry hippopotamus, ready to use his girth to wreck anything that pisses him off, not giving a shit what gets destroyed as long as he ends up getting his way at the end.

Liz Cheney may be a plague, but Trump is a poison. Stop the thing that acts faster before going after a cure for the other.

(Note: I couldn't work him into this piece, but, man, fuck Jared Kushner in every fucking hole he has in his soft, patrician body, and even in a few holes that aren't there. What a goddamn worm.)